Editor’s Note: The translations that make up this dossier were completed by students of the University of Exeter under the direction of professor Katie Brown, and are dedicated to the memory of Libby Jones, a former student of the University of Exeter, a talented translator, and a contributor to LALT. She is greatly missed by all who knew her.
In recent months I have had the opportunity to hold an extensive and very stimulating dialogue with the writer Elisa Lerner (b.1932, Valencia, Venezuela), over email. During this lengthy interview, we discussed various aspects of her work, which spans multiple genres, including crónicas, drama, essays, short stories, novels, and aphoristic writing. As a sample of this interview, we offer LALT readers a brief segment, in which we refer to a fundamental aspect of her literary work, that of the singular relationship between prose and poetry in her writing.
Arturo Gutiérrez Plaza: You belong to a generation of prose writers who were close to many poets and were also assiduous readers of poetry. This practice, which was very frequent among Hispano-American writers until the end of the twentieth century, seems to me to have fallen into disuse. It seems that few young prose writers are interested in poetry. That, perhaps, also speaks of a different conception of the work of language that prose demands. Faulkner said: “I’m a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can’t, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.” As an extraordinary prose writer, please tell us about your relationship with poetry and your perception, in general, of the nature of the dialogue between prose writers and poets.
Elisa Lerner: I think a book’s plot, above all, is the language itself. It is even a good verbal plot that shapes the pages. What could be called a good verbal plot? One that is illuminated by the very personal light of poetry. Something like a verbal canto. A page that is enlivened more by images, metaphors, the ingenuity of the language, than by the actual contents of the story. Although, unfortunately, we cannot always detach ourselves from the plot. We are not unaware that the story, more than just being a beautiful forest, is a bleeding forest.
A novel can seem almost dispensable if it is not accompanied by verbal music. If I were a gambling woman, I would bet on a game of linguistic chess. If we’re lucky, we can start with those incomplete pieces we have that we want to give some order or destiny to through writing and which almost always originate in the nocturnality of dreams. Or that which we also try to establish through that other dense nocturnality, even in broad daylight: solitude. On many occasions, solitude is even generous with us so that, amid the prosaic and painful aspects of life, if we are at all faithful to “Her,” to solitude, the Fairy of poetry, she greets us and lightens our page of writing. Solitude, in terms of page output, is perhaps the harshest editor and, simultaneously, the most abundantly generous one.
Of course, there are writers who are happy to tell a story where, for the most part, finesse and imagination in the combination of words are quite absent. On the contrary, from the very beginning, one has wanted to count on the yearning of poetry. If possible, let it be set to silent music, to the hushed operatic aria of a well-written page. Because poetry, with its nuances of extremely delicate essence, as we see it, is the philharmonic orchestra of the page of the writer we want to read. These orchestras are overwhelmingly beautiful.
When we started writing, perhaps fortunately for us, there were not as many thriving publishing houses eager to publish books that ensure immediate sales success as there are now. This allowed us to be quite free in what we read. Something that was, of course, good for us: literature would make us happy, but it would not lift us out of poverty. It would not lead us to any prosperity. We were strictly literary young people. Perhaps influenced by Argentine publishing houses where Jorge Luis Borges or Victoria Ocampo had a lot to say. Today, Instagram, as we all know, offers perhaps more triumphant alternatives for prose, but perhaps these alternatives are also more trivial. However, whether we like it or not, it is an inescapable mirror of our times. It does not merely repeat, in men and women alike, the banal monologue of Snow White’s stepmother. To our surprise, we suddenly find delicacies such as those offered in the beautiful prose of Marina Gasparini.
I am inclined to believe that, behind the pages of a good prose writer, there shines “the black sun” from the stanza of a poem by Paul Celan.
A.G.P.: A brief but very substantial essay by Eugenio Montejo on your prose begins: “Elisa Lerner’s writing seems to be guided by an eye that, without being distracted from seeing, shows itself to be destined above all to hear.” That penetrating assertion by the great Venezuelan poet and essayist, who was so close to you, is complemented a few lines later by another statement: “The habit of meticulous care watches over each of her pages, without failing to make timely use of irony, unpredictable metaphor, the wink of tenderness, as well as the finest humor and wit, all of that, as I have already said, harmonized by the mastery of an eye that has attentively learned to hear.” I would say that this harmony is one of the most singular characteristics of your prose, and I would say that this eye that watches over it is, above all, an imaginative and thinking eye, a kind of needle that listens without ceasing to see and that writes like one who weaves a colorful tapestry of varied tones, governed by proliferating and unusual similes and metaphors, always within the coordinates of a calculated balance. I find curious the reflection you make that you conceive of your writing as a “game of linguistic chess,” as it not only points in the direction of what I said, but also refers to Montejo’s conception of poetry as “a melodious chess,” with the addition that it is one “we play with God in solitude.” What do you think of these assessments of your writing? In your case, does God have any foothold in the solitude of which you have spoken?
E.L.: What a beautiful question! Beautiful indeed, but also arduous, without a doubt, like the previous ones. When a poet is the one asking the question, one would like to ask the stars for a little of their light, or failing that, to ask their vicarious ambassadors on earth; none other than the poets. Moreover, these are questions of exaggerated generosity towards a modest prose writer. With this, I would like, in passing, to pay a small tribute to our great poet Eugenio Montejo. Eugenio, like Ramos Sucre before him, was a genius of language; of the most beautiful poetry. We are too easily entertained by the pain caused by tyrants in our lands and in others. And we are not sufficiently consoled by beauty. It is perhaps superfluous to add that the greatest beauty, for the sensitive heart, is the diamond that is a poem.
I did not remember that I answered the previous question saying “the game of linguistic chess.” I think, to my great happiness, that much of Montejo’s poetry is within me and, with the passage of time, one perhaps acquires an enigmatic and personal way of remembering. Let us remember that the water of memory and of time is impatient and ever-changing.
Chess is also in me. Of course, not because I am a master at it or even know the game very well—I wish I did—but because when I was a child, I have a memory of a couple of silent Jews pondering a small chess board, playing combinations that took an endless amount of time. Apparently, chess is a parlor game. However, I became convinced that it was a civilized combat where the only objective was to think. Each piece that moved on the small board moved as the result of slow thinking, of a very deep wager of intellect. I think that, in a way, it is the same with a page of writing: one changes a word, a paragraph, even more than one page, almost always in the reflective and silent manner of a chess player.
Only, in the chess game a writer plays, solitude comes to their aid. And what is the patient solitude of the poet and the writer, if not a voice? A voice that gives us language, characters, images, and poems. And that voice to which we listen in rapture, with our writing pencil lit like a small fire—is it not “the game with God in solitude” of Eugenio’s beautiful sentence?
Yes, I firmly believe that in the silence of poets and great writers is the diction of God. That is why in a beautiful poem I find the fervor of a prayer.
However, I am struck by a tremendous doubt: Why is God silent when there is so much pain in the world? This is the silence which Elie Wiesel, a superb chronicler of the Holocaust, and one of its victims, complained about. Many had a heart ready to listen, but God did not let his voice be heard. We know that tyrants and despots waste no time in solitude except to listen to themselves. It is our great suffering, our inconstancy in hearing God’s voice more often. Are we too ambitious in the midst of our precarious destiny? I do not say it for myself, because I have already said it; in the middle of vast solitude, I thought I heard one of His murmurs. Pity that, already being an “Old Lady,” my hearing is a little damaged. However, as a sentence comes to me, I deceivingly think I hear a little melody. The great poet Eugenio Montejo did not write about “a melodious chess” for nothing.
Although admittedly I do not know how to weave, writing is like completing a weave with flimsy yarn which, suddenly, becomes tangled, its weak thread is broken, and then it starts all over again. When I am unexpectedly interrupted, the thread is orphaned, bereft of a sentence, lost halfway through, like a gnome whose slippers have been destroyed along the path.
Translated by Sophie Paynter
Photo: Venezuelan writer Elisa Lerner, by Martha Viaña Pulido.
